Similar Covers: Bird’s Nests (Part 2)

Back in June, I posted four covers featuring bird’s nests, three of which contained three eggs. I’ve now found three more: A Perfect Arrangement by Suzanne Berne, Steps and Exes: A Novel of Family by Laura Kalpakian and the German translation of When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times by Pema Chödrön. I wonder why three eggs are so popular?

I must admit I liked the four original covers much more than any of these three!

Stream of Suggestions Challenge: Review Linkup

June 1, 2010, to December 30, 2011

I’m still hoping some of you will join me for my Stream of Suggestions Reading Challenge. Read the sign-up post by clicking on the name of the challenge or the button above. The challenge isn’t too demanding, as you only have to read and review three books to complete it.

Once you’ve read and reviewed a book, link up to your review below and let me know in the comments!

The image used in the button is a picture of a stream near the Gabes Mountain trailhead in Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee. This picture was taken by Brian Stansberry and is under Creative Commons license.

Mailbox Monday (January 17)

Mailbox Monday is the gathering place for readers to share the books they received during the previous week. Warning: Mailbox Monday can lead to envy, toppling TBR piles and humongous wish lists! Mailbox Monday, which was started by Marcia at The Printed Page, is on blog tour—this month, it’s hosted by Rose City Reader.

I received three books in the mail this week, one for review and two that were gifts from my dad. The one for review is Half in Love: Surviving the Legacy of Suicide by Linda Gray Sexton, which was sent to me by the author for a TLC Book Tour in February. The two gifts are Unfinished Desires and The Making of a Writer: Journals, 1961-1963, both by Gail Godwin. I’m very much looking forward to reading all three of these!

From the front flap of Half in Love:

After the agony of witnessing her mother’s multiple—and ultimately successful— suicide attempts, Linda Gray Sexton, daughter of the acclaimed poet Anne Sexton, struggles with an engulfing undertow of depression. Here, with powerful, unsparing prose, Sexton conveys her urgent need to escape the legacy of suicide that consumed her family—a topic rarely explored, even today, in such poignant depth.

Linda Gray Sexton tries multiple times to kill herself—even though as a daughter, sister, wife, and most importantly, a mother, she knows the pain her act would cause. But unlike her mother's story, Linda’s is ultimately one of triumph. Through the help of family, therapy, and medicine, she confronts deep-seated issues and curbs the haunting cycle of suicide she once seemed destined to inherit.

From the back cover of Unfinished Desires:

It is the fall of 1951 at Mount St. Gabriel’s, an all-girls school tucked away in the mountains of North Carolina. Tildy Stratton, the undisputed queen bee of her class, befriends Chloe Starnes, a new student recently orphaned by the untimely and mysterious death of her mother. Their friendship fills a void for both girls but also set in motion a chain of events that will profoundly affect the course of many lives, including those of the girls’ young teacher and of the school’s matriarch, Mother Suzanne Ravenel.

Fifty years on, the headmistress relives one pivotal night, trying to reconcile past and present, reaching back even further to her own senior year at the school, where the roots of a tragedy are buried.

From the back cover of The Making of a Writer:

Gail Godwin was twenty-four years old when she wrote: “I want to be everybody who is great; I want to create everything that has ever been created.” It is a declaration that only a wildly ambitious young writer would make in the privacy of her journal. Now, in The Making of a Writer, Godwin has distilled her early journals, which run from 1961 to 1963, to their brilliant and charming essence. She conveys the feverish period following the breakup of her first marriage; the fateful decision to move to Europe and the shock of her first encounters with Danish customs (and Danish men); the pleasures of soaking in the human drama on long rambles through the London streets and the torment of lonely Sundays spend wrestling these impression into prose; and the determination to create despite rejection and a growing stack of debts. “I do not feel like a failure,” Godwin insists. “I will keep writing, harder than ever.”

Brimming with urgency and with, Godwin’s inspiring tome opens a shining window into the life and craft of a great writer just coming into her own.

What did you find in your mailbox this past week? For other Mailbox Monday posts, head over to Rose City Reader.

Mailbox Monday (January 10)

Mailbox Monday is the gathering place for readers to share the books they received during the previous week. Warning: Mailbox Monday can lead to envy, toppling TBR piles and humongous wish lists! Mailbox Monday, which was started by Marcia at The Printed Page, is on blog tour—this month, it’s hosted by Rose City Reader.

I received one book in the mail this week: Lonely: Learning to Live with Solitude by Emily White from Harper Perennial for a TLC Book Tour in February.

What did you find in your mailbox this past week? For other Mailbox Monday posts, head over to Rose City Reader.

Brogan’s Review: Arlington Park by Rachel Cusk

It’s been way too long since I’ve posted one of my sister Brogan’s reviews. Without further ado, here’s her review of Arlington Park by Rachel Cusk.

I picked up Arlington Park because I’d read another book by Rachel Cusk, A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother, which I found quite interesting and which made me want to read one of her novels. Arlington Park is set in an upscale London suburb by the same name and follows the lives of a few families in the neighbourhood—particularly from the women’s point of view—without any particular thread between them, other than the occasional meeting or dinner date. It takes on their varying levels of disgruntlement with, and understanding of, their lives as they are.

I was reminded of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse in the way that Arlington Park is written, dramatically yet dispassionately, very “third person,” sometimes flowing into a description of the weather or the street without any connection to character at all. Also in a similar way to Woolf, Cusk at times zooms in on a small detail or a moment that becomes metaphorical even to the characters as they are living an experience:

“She gave Amanda a raffish smile with her yellowed teeth. Her small blue eyes in their striated pockets of skin twinkled with suggestion. Sometimes Amanda had seen her and Max going out for the evening and Jocasta looked beautiful. The sight of her then caused Amanda to feel that there were certain people she lacked the ability to perceive, just as she often failed to see in famous paintings what it was that they were famous for. It gave her a sensation of instability, like vertigo.

‘We’re just boring,’ Amanda said.

Jocasta looked astounded and slightly embarrassed by this reply.

‘Oh, darling!’ she cried. ‘You’re not boring—nobody’s boring! I didn’t mean to suggest that at all, you poor thing!’” (p.55)

Each chapter introduces a new character and a new point of view, until about three quarters of the way through when Cusk brings us back around to some familiar names. This rhythm feels comfortable. The different characters are all almost equally interesting, and I found myself reassured by the return of some of them so I could situate myself and return to people I cared about. However, I did find myself wanting more of them… not just in a good way, of wanting more of the book after it ended, but also wanting something more of significance. Why give us these characters, some of whom we come to care about, if they are nothing but solitary, singular, strange? What was Cusk trying to say about them, or about modern life? I felt like there was something more, and it didn’t ever manifest; she was on the cusp of saying something, but she stopped.

Some of the characters (Liz, Christine) are rather vacuous, which Cusk presents as a not-too-positive aspect of this suburban existence, but in her keenness to present them without judgement, I found myself wondering at some points how much I wanted to read about them. As they seem to learn nothing nor grow in any way during the narrative, why do I want to spend my time in reading an exact rendition of them? I also felt that because some of these characters are rather similar to each other—again, a point I think Cusk was trying to make about suburbia and our lives in it—I felt that the characters “slipped” sometimes, and I didn’t actually feel like I knew any of them, or like they had any character; whatever she wrote as coming next didn’t feel like it flowed from what had come before.

On the other hand, some interactions are rendered brilliantly, as when a few of the Arlington Park women go over to Amanda’s house and they spend the whole time talking to each other and not to Amanda (specifically about her house and her husband), not to be insulting but just as a style of conversation, which felt very real—and alienating, as I think it was meant to. Or the scenes with Juliet, one of the few recurring characters, during which she has inner dialogues with herself, trying to understand where she is in her life, her relative non-success as a mother and teacher (in that she doesn’t stand out), when as a student she was exceptional.

This book is exquisitely written, with some characters rendered in such a breathtakingly precise way that you can’t help but care about them and want to know more about them. It is trying to do something difficult, which is to ask critical questions about people who are asking very few of those questions of themselves, by portraying them exactly as they are.

I wanted more from this book than what was there, but this is definitely a worthwhile read, and I will be watching for more from Rachel Cusk.
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Other reviews:

Book World • Catching Days • Curled Up with a Good Book • Eve’s Alexandria • Lovely Treez Reads • Mostly Fiction Book Reviews • Torque Control • Vulpes Libris • Women’s Literature – Book Reviews
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New Year’s Resolutions: 11 for 2011

Here are my bookish resolutions for 2011:

1. Read at least 50 books
   


2. Keep track of the books I read (so I can write a “best of” post at the end of the year)
   


3. Not accept any new review books until June 1 (or BEA, if I go)
   


4. Not acquire any new books until June 1 (or BEA, if I go)
– except during trips
– except books already requested or ordered
– except gifts
– except book club books


5. Post a review every week (including guest reviews)


6. Play with new review formats


7. Post a new (maybe monthly) series


8. Complete three reading challenges (including my own Stream of Suggestions Challenge)
   


9. Tweak my blog design and update my blog (fix blog pages that are currently under construction and update review indexes)


10. Participate in a readathon


11. Organize my bookshelves (which involves some serious purging!)

As some of you may remember, a few of these resolutions were already part of my 40/40 Challenge, which essentially means I’m giving myself an extension on them!

Have you made any resolutions for 2011?

The New Year’s Resolution postcard comes from Wikimedia Commons. It is in the public domain.

Similar Covers: Woman Underwater

Happy belated New Year! Despite my best of intentions, I’m already off to a bad start this year! I’m just going to pretend that it’s Wednesday and give you a “similar covers” post for starters (my resolutions will have to wait until tomorrow).

So first up this year is a trio of underwater covers, inspired by Kay’s “Artsy Shelf Underwater” post from last year: A Blue So Dark by Holly Schindler (which is one of the covers that Kay posted), Rain Village by Carolyn Turgeon (which I immediately thought of when I saw Kay’s covers) and Spirits of the Sea: The Siren’s Song, a CD by France Ellul.

Rain Village was actually published first, by Unbridled Books, in 2006. A Blue So Dark came out with Flux last year. (Spirits of the Sea used this image first, as it was released in 2005, according to Amazon.) I like all three covers, but I think A Blue So Dark is my favourite. But then again, maybe I like Rain Village better. I can’t decide. What do you think?